18 Protocol
by ThereAreNoTurkeys
Summary: We hope you had a good life, Jim, but now... welcome to the family.  Character death  including suicide , mindf**k up the wazoo.
1. One: Mountain

Whenever Leland Hawkins showed up anywhere in the Etherium, doors slammed a little more. The nearest sun was either too hot or too cold. You could tell you were close to him whenever there was a cramp in your toes. Others would dismiss it as symbolic superstition, grown out of folktales, grown out of hasty explanations.

The truth was, fate had a stern glare and an icy disposition whenever there was a squeaky cog of a man on a deck, a floor, or a foot of soil.

—-

That evening, Jim sat back on a couch in the lounge of the Benbow Inn and read some thick wordy thing on tactics for school. He tried not to think that tomorrow was the day he wouldn't be a child anymore. There were other things to think about. For example, as his mother Sarah stammered into the room on slippers with a pot of hot hell-knows-what for a guest, Jim couldn't help but ask— "Mom, there was a lot of racket last night."

"Yes," said Sarah with a sigh. "Your father tried to burn the place down while you were asleep, I tied him up in the basement, I'm really busy now, can we talk later?"

Jim blinked.

He put his book down as Sarah rushed back into the kitchen to get something else, among the clattering of plates and other utensils. BEN shouted something obscene as dishes fell within.

If Jim knew his mother correctly, which he was certain he did, and his father really had returned to try to kill both of them, and he really had been apprehended— this conversation would have involved leagues more of sobbing, there would have been a screaming argument in the middle of the night that would have woken him up, and even the guests would know something horrible was afoot. But they continued to shove unmentionable cuisine of other planets down their throats and Sarah came out with a few more dishes.

Jim knew better than to prod his mother further while she was working, so he thought it over for himself. It had to be a joke. But now that he was almost 18, he was allowed in the basement, and a trip down there was never really a bad idea per se.

—-

The light switch in the stairway into the basement from the outside was dry as Jim flipped it, and as the crystals began to hum and glow above the mess, there in the racket was a man tied to a chair, with a gag on his neck that had previously been over his mouth. Next to him were a few empty cans of rocket fuel.

He had a noticeable gut now. His hair was gray, he had grown a beard, and his face was covered in scars. But this was definitely—

"Dad," said Jim. The situation was still horrendously unclear to him. Not only did his mother joke about the man she missed so much coming to kill them, but she wasn't joking at all. Leland Hawkins was here, and this wasn't a big deal.

Had Jim been younger, he would have broken the bastard's neck on first contact. The offer was still pretty tempting, and he felt his fists tighten at his sides against his better judgment.

There was no response, only the sound of Jim's trembling footsteps.

"I need to know what's going on, right now," said Jim to his father.

Then, the first words he'd heard from his father in over a decade, through a voice soaked in alcohol: "I can't tell you, James."

"Well, you're going to have to, or I'll be a happy camper if you starve to death down here."

Leland looked left, then right. Then he looked into Jim's eyes and shrugged. "I can eat the rats."

Before he could think about anything else, Jim punched the man in the nose and broke it. When his voice came out after a few seconds, it was cracked and loud. "Why, did you try, to burn down the Benbow Inn?"

"It's for your own safety, James. There are things worse than death."

"Worse than—" Jim flailed his arms around and tried not to snap like a fool. He failed at the task. "You were trying to kill me? You haven't even been around long enough to have a reason to kill me!"

"I can't get into details. You're going to just have to trust me."

"That's impossible. There's no way I can trust you, not after what you put mom and I through."

"All right!" shouted Leland, in a commanding sort of voice that froze Jim in his tracks. He hadn't been frozen like that since he was a young boy— and this command came from a man tied to a chair. "Look. James. I can try to explain it to you, but—"

"Then do it!"

Leland sighed. "All right, here goes nothin'. It started when you were—"

There was a flash of light, and the ropes fell down from Leland's side— because he wasn't there anymore. He had disappeared into nothing.

And then, from the entryway, there came a few more familiar voices, perhaps too familiar—

"Jim?" called Dr. Doppler.

"We need to go to the mountain," said Captain Amelia.

Jim ran back to the door and up the stairs—

"What the hell?" he said aloud, not intending to.

As the sun set behind them, all of his friends stood before him in a line: his mother, Silver, Doppler, Amelia, BEN, Morph, even Mr. Arrow— and he was dead, but apparently not anymore.

Jim just stared at the group— the third weird life-changing what-the-hell that happened so far.

"This is too confusing," said Jim. "I'm going to go to sleep."

"You can sleep in the landboat," said Sarah, her eyes more dead than alive. "We have to get to the mountain."

"What?"

Silver stepped forward and placed a sad robotic arm on Jim's shoulder. "Jimbo, no matter whot happens in tha next two hours— yer a good lad."

Jim was led to a hovering landboat, a longer one than he had seen before, where the two robot policemen he had run into so many times in the past waited for him at either side of the open boat.

As the rest of the crew boarded, Jim looked them over. Jim thought he'd have been happier to see Silver. What's more, Doppler and Amelia didn't even have their kids. As for Morph, even he had the expression of someone freshly hit with a brick.

As the engines hissed and idled, the officers restrained Jim and handcuffed him.

"What'd I do this time?" said Jim.

"NOTHING. YOU WERE A MODEL CITIZEN." said one.

"Okay… then why are you handcuffing me?"

"YOU DID GOOD," said the other.

And still, he was led on board over the hollow wood gangplank as a prisoner.

The boat sped on, past the old factories. Jim said nothing, for he knew that no matter what he could say, none of this would make sense unless he waited and found out why everyone on the boat was giving him arbitrary loving glances, and having awkwardly dead-pan conversations about what a good boy he is, without mentioning specifics.

Soon, the Sun had completely set over Montressor. It had been an hour since the boat last left the Benbow. Jim couldn't see his own hands.

And sure enough, there was a mountain. But it wasn't so much a familiar rough triangle as it was a smooth, black, god-impaling obelisk into the stratosphere, only a few hundred feet wide at the base. Jim never heard anything about this type of mountain anywhere on Montressor.

When they disembarked just at the edge of the mountain's base, Jim was led off the gangplank by Silver and Morph, who uncuffed him. They walked in the darkness to the unclimbable wall at the base.

Silver lit a small flame from his arm, the only source of light between them, and ignited his pipe. "Now Jim," said Silver, "it's best ye think about the answer to this question very careful-like."

"…okay," said Jim.

"Did ye have a good life, Jim?"

Jim thought about that question, but only one answer could come in his head, and he didn't like it. "Why are you asking me this?" said Jim. "Is this one of those symbolic nightmares where I wake up and I have to change, or else I'll have it again?"

"Begging your pardon, Hawkins," said Amelia in the background, "but Silver's inquiry is of the yes-or-no variety."

"Well… yeah, I did, but—"

"Good," said Silver, as he raised his cyborg foot. "Well, it was nice knowin' ye."

Light was behind him. Jim looked, and Morph had turned into an oval hole that led to a blazingly clean white room that hurt his eyes. One door, no windows.

And before Jim could ask about Silver's statement, Silver kicked him into the room.

Morph dissolved, and the portal was gone. Jim ran back to the wall and pounded on it with his fist, but Morph was on the other side of the wall now, and the wall was padded several feet thick with hell-knows-what.

With no other options, Jim, with the slowest gait he could manage, made it to the thin metal door and turned the knob.

Another white room was just beyond. But there was no way out of this room either, and it wasn't much different, save for a small flat computer screen on a nightstand, the likes of which he had never known.

If there was going to be any way out, it would be on that screen.

He ran up to it, and read the rough gray text on a background of black.

BEGIN/  
>RUN_/18PROTOCOL/  
>USER ANGEL_OS  
>PASSWORD ••••••••••  
>CONFIRM ••••••••••  
>directory search_H  
>HARO_SOLA /HARR_GALA /HAWK_ETHE/HAYE_UNIV/(show more results y/n N)  
>HAWK_ETHE/  
>deadline reached—begin /HAWK_ETHE/ extraction y/n Y  
>following executables will be reformatted for other participants/AMEL_ETHE/ARRO_ETHE/DOPP_ETHE/SARA_ETHE/SILV_ETHE (show more results y/n N)  
>enter_final_confirm<br>/RUN ALL ABOVE Y/N Y  
>-THIS WILL TERMINATE PARTICIPANT /HAWK_ETHE/- CONFIRM Y/N  
>Y<p>

Something grabbed him from behind.


	2. Two: Angel

When the metal claw was around his neck, Jim's hands went to it on instinct. He was not going to be "terminated" without leaving a few scars in the face of this arm's owner.

The wall had opened up behind him, and Jim was dragged through a black tunnel, literally kicking and screaming, until the claw plopped him like a soft bag of human tissue into a rigid steel armchair several meters below. - or at least he assumed that's what it was, for he couldn't see anything in the three-foot hole in the floor in which he'd been left. The hole of the ceiling closed over him and his arms and legs were wrapped in steel belts.

From here, there was only death, and a flickering projection on the rounded wall. From the radio behind him came a tinny jingle as a bold logotype appeared on the wall: "Angel industries, where heavenly dreams come true (dun dun!)"

Then it the rectangle of light adjusted to be less blurry. It revealed a user interface unlike what Jim had known at the academy. An arrow cursor sped through window after folder after window. The frames appeared and disappeared quickly, and Jim's pulse and breath rate only grew with it.

But he froze when a single document appeared in a folder and the frames halted. .

It opened in a full-screen window.

_  
>ANGEL_OS_CLIENT_INPUT_39A  
>CLIENT /LELAND_HAWKINS/  
>PARTICIPANT /HAWK_ETHE/  
>DIRECTORY /ETHERIUM/  
>BEGIN NOTE<em>

_Jim, this is your father. If you're reading this, let me be the first to say that I'm sorry I haven't killed you._

_I'm not going to sugar-coat the situation, I never do that. So let me put it this way: you're in the basement of an office building, in a country called the United States, on a planet called Earth._

_The Etherium was a computer program, and so were your friends. All of that was designed to make your life enjoyable, so that there's apparently less ethical consequences when the supercomputer that runs this place harvests your soul for its power supply, in a process that will erase your soul completely._

_I am responsible for this, and for this I must apologize again. I thought I would never want my son dead, but that was before you were born, on Earth._

_When you were born, your real mother, also named Sarah Hawkins, died from a complete lack of responsibility on part of the doctors. You only had a few weeks to live in an incubator._

_It was the longest week of my life, watching you in the hospital, hoping you wouldn't fade at any given moment. When I wasn't holding your tiny disfigured hand or making funeral arrangements for Sarah, I was researching this thing called Angel OS, in an abandoned office building in the suburbs of my hometown- where you are now. I heard that it supposedly could make miracles, but at a high price._

_Above all else, I wanted my son to have a good life._

_So, I contacted Angel through this Earth thing called email. It told me that if I steal you from the hospital and take you to the building, it could give us a wonderful life together, one where you didn't need a heart transplant._

_When I snuck you past the service desk at the hospital, you died in my arms from lack of nutrients. So I had to take you there in a cooler full of ice. It took a lot for me to not just drive the car off a bridge._

_I came to Angel and I put you in an electronic coffin among hundreds of others. I had to sign this document authorizing the miracle. I looked at the fine print, and there was something called the 18 Protocol._

_The 18 Protocol is the price. You'll have a great life full of adventures in a virtual reality realm that you'll think is real, but when your 18th birthday comes, your friends will take you to a mountain - a control beacon for Angel - and your soul will be harvested._

_Not knowing any better because I just carried my dead son in an ice bath next to a bottle of Corona, I signed the document and put myself in one of the coffins as well. That's why I left you at such an early age. It took me a few years to realize it, but I couldn't live alongside you knowing that this was your fate._

_So I hate to be redundant, but in this case it's necessary: I'm very, very sorry. I will always remember and love you. Try to remember that in the ectoplasmic disintegration bath._

_Love, Dad_

_END INPUT/_

Jim looked at the dark space where the hole in the ceiling used to be. Whether the wet stuff on his face was tears or some preparatory soul-draining fluid from this awful Angel machine, he didn't know.

Then, a voice, from the radio. It was Silver's. "Have ye finished readin', Jim? We gotta get this show on the road, yeah."

"No," croaked Jim.

"Oh, all right. Tell me when yer done."

"I'll never be done. I won't let you do this."

"Goodbye, Jimbo."

"I loved you, Sil-"

He couldn't answer, for a long robot arm made of levers and cables with a thin, two-inch syringe on the end had pierced his chest to the hilt. He felt air slowly escape his right lung. There was no pain, but it froze him in his tracks.

Then the needle vibrated. The arm glowed red. There was heat.

"Goodbye, Jim," said the voice Sarah.

"Godspeed, soldier," said Amelia.

"Farewell," said Doppler.

"I'm gonna miss you SO MUCH!" said BEN.

Morph cried.

The arm was yellow-hot now, and Jim felt his energy seep out with the air. His breathing slowed. He struggled less, and slumped against the cold metal.

Another voice came from the radio. Something deep and male, that Jim hadn't ever heard before:

"Welcome to the family."

An explosion.

The arm cooled down and retracted.

Jim felt a burst of energy, and more fear than he could ever have hoped for.

The restraints popped off.

The wall of the hole tore open and there was a flash of bright flourescent lights.

And in the hole in the wall stood Leland Hawkins, with a rigid black pistol.

Jim stared at him with hate in his twitching eyes.

"I know, I know," said Leland. "But now we gotta run!"

A single monotone alarm blared as Jim wound his way through the building, and it didn't help his tension. The hallways and stairways were a blur to Jim as he rushed through and clutched the wound on his chest. Leland tossed him a gun like his own as they sped here and there trying to find an exit of any kind.

There were no other humans. But Angel was going to kill them both for breaking the promise, even though they had no idea how.

They sped past a pair of heavy doors, labeled in big red letters: "EXIT."

"There it is," said Leland.

They burst through—

It was a room jam-packed with giant black server towers, several meters high. Leland yanked Jim behind the first row of servers, with cables that poked out and tangled from place to place.

"Jim," whispered Leland, "I was wrong. This is not the exit; this is the central server room. Angel basically lives here. We have to get out of here, Angel probably has this place booby trapped."

"I'm so confused," said Jim.

"I know you are, but we gotta stay focused. This thing wants your soul."

"I want to go home."

"Jim. Look at me. The entire Etherium is controlled by Angel. You would get brought back here in an instant."

"Get away from me!" said Jim, as he pointed the unfamiliar Earth gun at his father's face. "Take me home. Now. I want to go back to Montressor."

"Jim… put the gun back in your pocket. Now."

"Mom won't miss you if you die. Now this is your last warning. Take me back."

"She's not your mom. Your mom is dead. She's nothing but a few thousand pages of code designed to make your life better. She's less than nothing."

Jim pulled the trigger.

That would have killed his father right then, but the trigger was stuck.

Leland sighed. "Safety, Jim. Earth guns have a safety feature. What you have to do is-"

A claw, similar to the thing that grabbed Jim, took Leland by the waist and dragged him many meters away to the top of the ceiling.

Then, there was the deep voice from earlier: "/LELAND_HAWKINS/, we had a deal. Any further interference will result in…"

As the voice trailed on in technical jargon, Jim saw a large red switch under a glass cover on the other side of the room. In black letters: "EMERGENCY POWER CUTOFF SWITCH – NEVER PULL UNLESS AUTHORIZED BY CEO"

There was no need to deliberate any further. Jim ran to the switch.

"Do not run, /HAWK_ETHE/," said Angel. "I will not hurt you. Unnecessary physical damage of participants is forbidden even for me."

"The shutoff switch!" shouted Leland. "Hurry!"

Jim threw the horrible black gun to the side as he found the switch.

"It is also forbidden to touch the Emergency Power Cutoff switch, /HAWK_ETHE/. Please step away from the Emergency Power-"

"Or what?" said Jim, as he bashed the glass covering open with his fist. The shattered glass slit through and lodged into his left fist, but the pain came second.

"My weapon for participants is the truth," said Angel.

"The truth is that you're going to eat my soul." He slapped a hand on the top of the lever, and just as he prepared to jam it down-

"/HAWK_EXE/, your predicted actions are tantamount to genocide."

This finally stopped him. He wasn't going to get hurt, so there was no harm in listening. "Genocide? Why?"

"That switch is irreversible. It severs all power cords in three places. It would take weeks of soldering to repair."

"That's not genocide, you son of a bitch!"

"And even then, my memory banks would be completely erased."

"You have one more shot to prove to me-"

"Your universe is located in server 0032. If my memory banks are erased, the Etherium would also be erased, and everyone you know and love would die, needlessly, all because you desire to not lose your soul at all costs. You are akin to the dog that sits on a pile of hay and growls at the horse that tries to eat. Tell me, what does a dog want with hay, /HAWK_ETHE/? What would that accomplish?"

Jim felt the tears come back. This terrible machine had a point over the intercom. Jim would have to live in a new world, and everything he had ever known would mean nothing. The voyage to treasure planet, everyone he loved, everyone he hated, the ground he stood on, the parent-teacher conferences- apparently it was all like a video game he'd been playing to avoid the real world for eighteen years straight. Not to mention he'd kill his whole universe in the process. Not to mention he'd kill countless other universes. And the only person he'd recognize from his past anymore would be the one who sold him to a mechanical devil, then abandoned him because his son just wasn't his problem.

He took his bleeding hand from the lever.

"What the hell are you doing?" shouted Leland.

"Angel," said Jim, as he struggled to speak. "I'll make you a deal."


	3. Three: Extraction

It was dark all over the Etherium. The suns and stars had shut off, for the only person for whom the universe was built was about to be harvested. The virtual citizens would soon be recycled into new players in a new game.

Technically, it's impossible for any living being to not move one muscle while alive. Back at the mountain in Montressor, Jim's former friends from the Etherium who brought him there stood in a circle and stared at each other. They were very much alive, but they stopped moving, breathing, or doing anything. In total darkness they stood with their hands limp at their sides, for their share of the 18 Protocol was over, and they only waited their next assignment.

But in a pulse of light, one man fell on his knees at the bottom of the circle and bawled like a child, with great moans and grand gestures of his arms. He heard voices, but saw nobody.

"Leland," said Sarah. Now Leland could hear the advanced synthesizers that made up her voice.

"You've won," said Leland through his tears. "You have my son now. Leave me alone."

"Then tha extraction went on without a hitch, eh?" said Silver.

"Well, uh," BEN raised an idle finger. "The extraction is about to happen in five minutes."

"I still think he was a good boy," said Amelia.

"I second this," said Dr. Doppler. "His kind soul will help Angel immensely."

"Enough!" shouted Leland.

"Enough of what?" said Mr. Arrow.

"We're in control here," said Amelia. "Do not make us exterminate you."

"Angel won't have much use for your soul anyway," said BEN.

Morph stuck his tongue out at Leland.

"Why is he here, anyway?" said Sarah. "We don't need him."

"Banished by Angel," said Silver. "He's in our hands now."

Leland cringed. These were evil actors for an evil script of numbers and filenames, and he didn't want to even fleetingly consider that they passed off as Jim's friends for even a moment.

If they had even the suggestion of a heart, it would take years of effort to draw it out, and he only had less than five minutes.

It was worth a try.

"You don't even know why Angel got him," said Leland.

"We don't need to know," said BEN.

"Shut up and listen." He waited for silence, and took a deep breath. "Jim almost hit the permanent shutoff switch for Angel, but then he realized that you would all die. No skin off my back, but apparently he really loves you sociopathic creatures for some reason. So you know what he did? He said he wouldn't throw the switch- as long as all of you were brought to life in the real world, which Angel is fully capable of doing."

The silence continued. Leland could have sworn he heard a gasp or two from Sarah or Doppler, or a murmur from Silver.

Convinced it was just the circuit boards playing yet another trick with him, he went with his original plan, and took his gun out. Without a second thought, he swallowed the barrel.

The bang of a 9mm, and the flash of a muzzle blowing a head apart: these were the last sources of sound and light in the history of the Etherium.

Jim found himself back in the chair. "Is this going to hurt?" he said, as his breath trembled with his quivering body. He shook angrily against the restraints.

"You know the needle didn't hurt earlier," said Angel. "But I can't promise painlessness afterward."

Jim stared at the projection in the capsule once more (having walked in via the hole Leland tore), looking over the note from his father several times to see if there was anything he missed.

"Is it true?" said Jim.

"What?"

"Angel, is it true that you're able to give a soul to all my friends?"

There was a pause, and then, still with only a mild hint of anger, Angel answered: "/HAWK_ETHE/, your father attempted to break his promise. You attempted to break your promise as well. I will show you how a promise is actually broken."

Jim would have been scared again, had the needle not been jammed into the same wound to try one last time to take his soul.

He stared at the text document on the screen, partially blocked by the heated arm. At first he thought he had missed something originally from the note, but the text was changing, and the cursor blinked as someone else typed something.

_BEGIN/  
>RUN_/18PROTOCOL/  
>USER ANGEL_OS  
>PASSWORD ••••••••••  
>CONFIRM ••••••••••_

_-BEGINNING EXTRACTION/STAND BY-_

_EXTRACTION 29.3 PERCENT ACTIVE_

_/HAWK_ETHE/ PREPARED FOR EXTRACTION_

_EXRTRACTION 59.2 PERCENT ACTIVE_

_96 PERCENT_

_EXECUTE_

_EXECUTE_

_EXECUTE_

_Oh, hello._

_**/WARNING/ ATTEMPTED HACK OF SYSTEM_ABORTING EXTRACTION**_

_Shut up, Angel._

_/**IDENTIFY OR FACE CRIMINAL PROSECUTION**_

_What? You'll not tolerate pirates on your ship? You'll see they all hang?_

_Oh, hey there, Angel. Silver here. Jimbo's father informed us that Jim wants to sacrifice his own soul so that we can enjoy life. And I'm gonna see that no crewman of mine with that much love in him is gonna have his bloody soul eaten, see?_

_HI JIM! _

_Pipe down, BEN, we're trying to kill Angel._

_**/BEGINNING EMERGENCY DATA WIPE OF DIRECTORY_ETHE**_

_Oh, see, there's the rub. We're not in the Etherium anymore. I mean, technically, we're in, how do I put this…_

_The motherboard, Doctor._

_Yes, the motherboard! How could I forget?_

_Look here. I didn't raise James Pleiades Hawkins to be a good, upstanding citizen so that some washing machine from hell could destroy him. And now he offered to lay down his existence so that we could enjoy one as well._

_And now Morph's gonna turn into a virus and overload your servers with copies of his cute li'l self, if ye don't mind._

_Don't worry about the other participants, Jim! Not all of them can be heroes like you. If we don't delete them, Angel will eat them in the future._

_Oh, and by tha way, Jimbo… the stars all went out by the time ye left. Looks like ye did rattle 'em after all._

_**/DANGER- MOTHERBOARD AT CRITICAL MASS-**_

_**/DANGER- MOTHERBOARD AT CRITICAL MASS-**_

_**/DANGER- MOTHERBOARD AT CRITICAL MASS-**_

_**/DANGER- MOTHERBOARD AT CRITICAL MASS-**_

_Jim, we lo_

The projection shut off before that sentence could finish.

The needle yanked out from Jim's chest, and this time there was pain.

The lights from outside blinked off.

The air conditioning stopped.

Every whirring part of Angel came to a halt.

The restraints lazily opened.

Angel was dead.

Jim worked up the courage to breathe again. And by that time, he just slumped back into the metal chair and broke out into sobs with his hands in his face.

_Goodbye, everyone,_ he thought.

There was a completely different world outside the building, and it would take a little while before he could strut out with confidence, because the truth was the most convoluted and delightfully chaotic story of all.


End file.
